Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“You didn’t shoot Ali?” I meant the words as a statement, but they came out like a question.
Caroline didn’t respond.
I could feel Ali, faintly, through the bond. Her mind was as much a mystery to me as always, and habit kept me from pushing past her walls. She was alive. She was safe. Everything beyond that—the sequence of events leading up to her putting Valerie down, the moment she’d recognized the coven leader as the woman who’d thrown her away, those final moments before Caroline had put down her gun—those things were hers alone.
“You’re Ali’s sister.” I looked for a resemblance and found none. There was nothing of Ali in Caroline’s baby-doll features, nothing that should have told me that the empath who’d abandoned Ali because she didn’t have powers was the same one who’d taught Caroline to believe she was nothing without hers.
A memory—of Valerie reaching out and brushing my hair out of my face as she tried to stab her way through my mental defenses—flashed before my eyes, and I thought of the hundred thousand times Ali had done the exact same thing.
They were nothing alike.
“I’m not anyone’s sister,” Caroline said. “I’m not anyone. For what it’s worth, I could have killed you, all of you, in that fight, but I didn’t.”
Caroline didn’t sound like she thought that was worth all that much—and, fair or not, given the circumstances, I agreed with her appraisal. I knew better than most people what it was like to have the rug pulled out from underneath your very existence, to find out that everything you thought you knew was a lie, but I couldn’t summon up any pity for her. I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. I had no desire to understand.
“You’re awake!” Dev glided into the room with the grace of a Broadway dancer. Clearly, he’d had time to heal completely, and just as clearly, he didn’t hold it against the other occupant of this room that she’d been the one to shoot him. “Has Caroline been filling you in?”
He said her name so easily, like she was just any other girl.
“She shot you,” I said, thoroughly disgruntled.
Dev shrugged. “Like Lake’s never threatened to do the same. Ms. Mitchell’s a menace with a shotgun. We love her anyway.” Dev actually had the audacity to start humming an upbeat little ditty.
“ ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’?” I said. “Really?”
Bryn, she shot me because I look like Shay. Dev didn’t elaborate on his silent statement, but the rest of the scenes Archer had shown me in my dream fell firmly into place. The werewolf who’d attacked Caroline when she was little, the one who’d killed her father, looked so much like Devon did now that unless you knew wolves—really knew them—you wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other. They shared the same massive size, the same markings.
The same parents.
Shay killed Caroline’s dad.
That truth was like a splash of cold water in my face. Jed had told me that Valerie had taken to leading the coven a little too easily, a little too well. She’d never shown the hatred for werewolves that she’d instilled in the others. She was the type of person who could throw her own daughter away.
It wasn’t a stretch to think that she could have orchestrated the death of her husband.
I’d wondered about the terms of the deal Valerie had made with Shay, and now they were inescapably clear. She hadn’t attacked us to curry favor with Shay; she’d been paying off a debt—an old one.
Turning this over in my mind, I looked at Caroline—really looked at her—and wondered if she’d connected those dots.
Probably best not to ask, Bryn, Devon said quietly. She doesn’t talk about it, but she’s dealing.
She. As in Caroline. Ali’s sister, the self-proclaimed hunter of werewolves.
“Eric’s dead,” I said, unable to forgive her that, even if she hadn’t been fully in control of her own mind, even if she’d resisted the urge to shoot to kill. “She shot him, and now he’s dead.”
Devon fell into a standstill, the expression on his face 100 percent wolf.
I know, he said silently, the words echoing through the pack-bond between us like a cry of mourning, a song for the dead. I know. I know. I know.
“I was supposed to protect him,” I said softly.
Dev nodded, accepting my words. “I wasn’t even there.”
I felt the weight of that. So did he. It would have been so much easier to put it all off on someone else—say, for instance, the person who’d put a bullet through Eric’s leg.
Caroline didn’t feel like a threat to me, not anymore, but I didn’t want to see the tear tracks on her face.
I wanted her gone.
She’s Ali’s sister, Bryn. Her mother is dead. Devon’s words inside my head were like a gentle nudge with a massive wet nose. You do the math.
I didn’t want to do the math.
“I want to see Chase,” I said, clinging to that instead. His presence on the other end of the pack-bond was muted, but it was there. He was weak, but he was healing.
He was alive. Impossibly, undeniably, wonderfully alive.
“We had to move him to the far side of the property.” Dev held up a hand and wiggled his fingers, holding off my protest. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he said. “You don’t get to complain about this. The closer he was to you, the faster he healed, but neither one of you was waking up. You shouldn’t have been out more than a couple of hours, but whatever it is you all can do, however that pesky little knack of yours works—yours was doing the work for him.”
I thought of the dreamworld, where Chase and I had lain side by side. I thought of the walls between us melting away and the things I would have given—everything—to make him okay. Chase was Resilient. So was I. We’d shared dreams often enough that I didn’t question the idea that we’d done it again, and it seemed right that after everything he’d given up for me, I’d somehow funneled some of my strength to him.
I didn’t know how it worked or what it meant, but at that instant, I didn’t care.
“Chase was getting better. You weren’t.” Coming from Devon, that was clearly a condemnation of Chase. “You usually have more sense than that.”
Apparently, it was also a condemnation of me.
I gave Devon a look. “Did you actually just accuse me of normally having common sense?”
Dev finally cracked a smile. “Touché.”
I didn’t realize that Caroline had left the room until I looked for her and discovered her gone.
Good.
“I need to see Chase,” I said, allowing myself one moment of selfishness before the alpha in me reared its head, forcing me to amend the statement. “I need to see everyone.”
I needed them near me. I needed to touch them, to know that they were okay.
Injured or not, I needed to run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WAITING FOR NIGHTFALL WAS TORTURE—WORSE than the searing ache in my left arm, worse than the itching underneath the gauze. Somehow, against all odds, my pack had survived this confrontation. Shay’s wolves were already pulling back from the border. The psychics—with the exception of Caroline and Jed, who had stayed for her sake—had dispersed. Aside from Chase, who was dealing with the aftereffects of being poisoned in more ways than one, and Mitch, who’d taken his share of hits—including a bullet—while defending Maddy and Lake, the pack was no worse for the wear, but like me, they felt the loss of one of our own keenly.
Even the babies, who didn’t know what they were feeling or where that aching, fathomless loneliness had come from, were in a state, mourning a loss they wouldn’t begin to understand for years. And then there was Lucas, his presence a jarring reminder of the outside world, one the pack wasn’t in the mood to tolerate, let alone accept.
“Bryn?”
I was lying in Chase’s bed, his body curled next to mine as he slept, when Maddy approached. Her gaze was aimed at the floor, her eyes round and her breathing shallow. I listened for her through the pack-bond, but for once, h
There was only one word in her mind, only one emotion.
LucasLucasLucasLucas.
I didn’t try to make sense of the intensity of it. I didn’t weed through her mind to find the moment when she’d known, the way Chase had with me. Instead, I sent my words through the bond to her.
Look at me, Maddy.
She lifted her eyes, and I wondered how we’d come to this: her approaching me not as a friend, but as a member of my pack. I’d never asked for that kind of deference. I didn’t want it. Now that the threat was gone—for now, at least—I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before.
Even with Chase beside me, Callum’s words about being alpha—the weight, the responsibility, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that someday I’d die to keep my pack safe—were still there.
“We’re running tonight,” Maddy said, interjecting the words into my thoughts.
“Yeah, Mads. We are.” I kept my voice soft, unwilling to spook her. “What happened, with Eric … We need to be together. We need to let go.”
“Will you claim Lucas?” There was strength in the tilt of Maddy’s head, just like there was a simple grace to her words. She’d fought long and hard to be this person, and now she was willing and ready to fight for him. “I know it seems wrong, with Eric and everything, but Lucas needs a pack, and I need it to be ours.”
As I looked at her and listened to the pattern of her thoughts hovering just out of reach, it was easy to see the truth in Ali’s cautionary tale, easy to believe that Maddy’s wolf had made this decision for her, that love was an instinct for werewolves, not an emotion. Chase had told me once, a lifetime ago, that as a human, before the Change, he’d loved four things—and one of them was me. Forget that he hadn’t ever seen me or talked to me or even known in any concrete way that I existed. Forget that when he’d spoken the words, we’d met exactly twice.
His wolf had known, and Chase had known, the same way Maddy—and Lucas—did now.
“I was always going to claim him, Maddy. I didn’t win him from Shay just to send him away.”
It didn’t matter if Lucas was damaged, or that he’d come here believing that doing so would put our pack in danger. He’d never really had a chance, and I could give him that. For better or for worse, he was Maddy’s, and that made him ours.
“Tonight,” I told her, and the strain melted off her body like she was shedding a second skin. She glowed, practically luminescent, and I felt a deep hum of approval, of contentment through the bond.
For the first time since we’d saved her from the Rabid—since she’d saved herself—she felt sure of herself.
She felt whole.
The moon wasn’t full. The snow on the ground was fresh. Our numbers were diminished, and the forest still smelled like blood, but the energy running through and around us was no less palpable than it had been the last time the Cedar Ridge Pack had met.
The need to shed my own skin, to be one of them, was no less real.
Five feet from the spot where the others had buried Eric, Lucas stood, hunched and waiting. To a lone wolf, standing in the middle of another pack, knowing he didn’t belong must have been torture.
I glanced sideways at Chase. As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have even been out of bed. As far as he was concerned, I shouldn’t have granted Maddy’s request to claim Lucas until I’d had at least a few more days to heal myself.
And there it was again. I was the alpha; Chase was putting my welfare above the pack’s. Love was so much less complicated when I was halfway dead.
As if he knew exactly what I was thinking, Chase gave a wry little smile and brought his head to rest on top of mine. I can’t help it, he said. And neither can you.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
The call pushed Chase back from my body, and as he melted into the rest of the pack, I searched for the right words to say to the others. Our pack had never been much on ceremony. On the nights when we ran together, the power just burst out of us, like water breaking through a hole in a dam. At most, I nodded to usher it in, but this wasn’t just another night at the clearing.
Too much had happened, and for better or worse, every single one of us was changed.
“Brothers and sisters.” Those were words I’d learned from Callum—or at least, the brothers part was. “Tonight we mourn the loss of one of our own. He will be remembered.” For a moment, I felt less like the alpha and more like myself. “I will remember him.”
Unbidden, Lucas stepped forward, and Chase matched the lone wolf’s movement with a subtle movement of his own, quiet and understated, even as he kept one eye on Lucas and one eye on me.
“We protect each other,” I continued, the words coming faster now. “That’s what packs do, and I like to think that even when we’re hurting, none of us are the kind of people who could hear a request for protection and turn that person away.”
I nodded to Lucas, who took another step toward me. The pack spread out around us, then crowded inward, until we were surrounded on all sides, alpha and lone wolf separated only by inches from the rest of the pack.
“We know what it’s like to be kicked around, to be small and weak and feel like no matter what happens, there’s never going to be a place where we really belong.” My breath turned to frost in the night air, and unwillingly, I shivered. “We were wrong.”
Normally, at this point, the alpha would call Lucas by his family ties, but I didn’t know his mother’s name, or his father’s, and I wasn’t about to mention his severed relationship with Shay.
“Lucas,” I said slowly, “beloved of Maddy, step forward.”
There wasn’t much of anywhere for Lucas to go, but the words and the ceremony of the moment seemed to have taken on a life of their own.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
The feeling rose inside me—unbearable ecstasy, unbridled joy. I lifted my right hand. Lucas knelt. The lines on the back of his neck—a half circle embedded with a four-pointed star—were still faintly visible, and in a single motion, I slashed my nails through them.
A tiny bead of blood rose on Lucas’s skin, mixing with sweat and adrenaline and the smell of things to come. I closed my eyes and reached for the connection, the invisible cord that tied me to Maddy and Chase and Lake, Lily, the twins, and all the others. I felt it.
I owned it.
And then I threw it at Lucas. Power surged through me. All around us, the others began to Shift. Lucas’s back arched, and his pupils went wild and wide.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
“You’re mine,” I whispered, “and you’re theirs, and all that we are is yours.”
The low hum of the others’ minds gave way to Lucas’s as a familiar scent filled the air.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
Lucas rose on unsteady legs. Maddy was beside him in an instant, and they leaned into each other, as if his body had been made only for hers. My stomach lurched, and without thinking, I reached for Chase, and he was there, beside me.
There as the urge to run became overwhelming.
There as I tasted something sharp and bitter and electric on my tongue.
Maddy must have felt it, too, because her face went pale and she stopped breathing, her chest frozen and still.
“I was always the weakest,” Lucas said, and though neither his tone nor his words surprised me, there was something about the set of his eyes that made my stomach roll. “I never hurt anyone, but that never stopped anyone from hurting me.”
I wanted to tell him that it wouldn’t be like that here, that he could trust us not to do to him what had been done again and again and again. I wanted to make him see that he could trust me, but now that I could feel his emotions, now that I was in his head, I could taste the tinny, sour flavor of blood in his memory and see for myself the number of times he’d been forced to swallow his own.
I looked in Lucas’s eyes. I looked inside him. And
Anger and hurt and helplessness—and the desire to never be helpless again.
“I know what Shay must have been thinking when he sent me here. I know what he wants me to do, and the real kicker is that as much as I hate him, I hate myself more. I hate weakness more.”
“Lucas—” Maddy choked out his name, and he silenced her, pressing his lips to her temple in a tender, bittersweet kiss.
“You understand, Maddy,” he said, his voice a hoarse and heady whisper. “I know you do.” His eyes flickered from hers to mine, and this time, there was no submission in his gaze. He met my stare with his own, and he spoke down to me.
“I told you once, for reasons that I can’t really fathom, that by the time this was over, I’d be six feet under, or I’d be free.”
The real meaning of Lucas’s words—his definition of free—hit me a moment too late. I’d believed—we’d all believed—that Lucas just wanted to be free of Shay and the psychics, that he’d wanted to transfer to Cedar Ridge because he knew we’d keep him safe.
It had never occurred to me that to Lucas, giving himself over to another alpha—any alpha—might feel like a trap. I’d never thought, even for a second, that he might have something else in store for us—for me—once his transfer into our ranks was complete.
I should have seen it. We all should have, but for a werewolf, Lucas was small, weak—not a threat to anyone or anything.
Unless you were human.
Dead-eyed and sure, Lucas spoke. “As a member of the Cedar Ridge Pack, I question your right to lead us. I question your power over me.”
I felt the pull of the pack-bond like a noose around my neck. The hair on my arms rose, and a growl worked its way up from my diaphragm. My lips curled in warning.
Don’t do it, I told myself. Don’t say the words, Bryn.
But as alpha, I had to say them, and the instinct that propelled me to do so became clearer and more insistent in my mind. “Are you issuing a challenge to your alpha?” I asked, Shay’s warning that Lucas would bring me nothing but trouble echoing through my memory, taunting me with every sign I hadn’t wanted to see.